Bannister’s story was the catalyst for Messrs. Bowden, Chatterton, and Mattera’s determination to find the Golden Fleece, a quest smoothly described in “Pirate Hunters.” It would be churlish of me to disclose the result, but I can say that the three men become furious with one another, pore over time-worn archives in the U.S. and Europe, and confront armed robbers, money worries, rival divers, a mean barracuda and, perhaps most ominously, changing attitudes toward underwater treasure seekers.

Alas, WSJ reviewer Howard Schneider apparently felt a little dirty enjoying a summer read about high-seas criminality, scolding one of the wreck hunters for glamorizing the Long John Silver lifestyle:

Also problematic are Mr. Mattera’s belief that pirate ships operated on democratic principles. “The captain would exercise absolute authority only in battle,” Mr. Kurson summarizes. “At other times, he would guide the ship according to the pleasure of the crew.” For Mr. Mattera, Bannister “was a man enthralled by democracy,” and his metamorphosis into a pirate was occasioned by egalitarian idealism.

Setting aside Bannister’s precise motivations, Schneider needn’t be so skeptical about Mattera’s claims; the fact that many buccaneer vessels were floating republics has been well documented. The command structure was exactly as Mattera described, and pirate constitutions included workers’ compensation and equitable sharing of prizes, with officers and skilled craftsmen earning more than common sailors but not enough to incite jealousy. The system was so successful it was still used among privateers during the Revolution. From Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer (pp. 91-92):

It is remarkable what little difference stands between Smedley’s covenant with his sailors and those from the golden age of piracy. Loss of an arm or leg, “or be otherwise so disabled as not to earn his Bread,” was compensated with £1,000 onboard Hibernia. Under his English letter of marque, Henry Morgan granted “six hundred pieces of eight or six slaves” for a lost leg or hand. With Smedley, “[W]hoever shall first enter an Enemy’s Ship, after orders for boarding is issued, he shall receive three hundred pounds as a Recompense for his Valour.” Morgan rewarded the same with 50 pieces of eight. And, as captain, Smedley was entitled to eight shares of the half-prize awarded to officers and crew — the exact same portion given to captains sailing under Morgan’s flag a century prior.

Recognition that 17th- and early 18th-century pirate vessels were islands of democracy in a sea of autocratic empire explains why pirates had such an easy time recruiting sailors. A poor young man standing on the docks of London or another European port didn’t have many options. He could toil in the fields or streets living hand to mouth; or sell himself into indentured servitude in the colonies. Either way he had almost no chance of ever accruing enough capital to buy land or start a business, which were the only real paths to bettering himself. Many opted for the relative security of three hots and a berth onboard a ship but then had to suffer the sadistic discipline of the navy or, worse, the sadistic discipline and starvation rations of the merchant marine. Admiralty archives burst with transcripts of those who leapt to join pirate crews when overtaken, and pirates devised cunning ways to disguise this volunteerism in case they should later be apprehended and tried in court. As Peter Leeson observes in The Invisible Hook (pp. 154-155):

Contrary to popular perception, most pirates were volunteers, not conscripts. Pirates sought willing companions instead of forced men because of simple cost-benefit considerations, not because of a principled objection to using force to get what they wanted. On the one hand, in many cases pirates simply didn’t have to resort to coercion to increase their numbers. The better treatment and opportunity for vastly superior pay on pirate ships was plenty incentive for many sailors to sign on under the black flag when given the opportunity. The benefit of conscripting ordinary sailors was therefore quite low. On the other hand, the costs of pressing sailors could be very large. … They could escape, informing authorities, or leaving the remaining crew too small to take advantage of the ship. Even if conscripts didn’t manage to escape, a crew with a sizable portion of forced men was less likely to succeed since conscripts didn’t have the same incentive to participate as volunteers.

Often only surgeons and skilled craftsmen were pressed into pirate service and that was because their incomes were already secure; they had more to lose than gain by going on the account. But the exact opposite was true for common sailors.

So Mr. Schneider, the next time you pull up your skirts and stand on a chair at the sight of someone extolling the benefits of fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, imagine this scenario:

You are at your bullpen desk, tapping away at your latest review, when a group of Rikers Island inmates bursts in, clad in orange jumpsuits, tattooed and pierced and armed six ways to Wednesday. Some are murderers and rapists but all are thieves as they proceed to loot the Journal offices. This done, they then ask for volunteers — and to your marveling eyes, interns and receptionists and copy boys and Starbucks runners scramble to join. And why? Because the lives of these people you’ve ignored and mistreated are so awful that running off with a gang of thugs is an improvement for them.

That’s the Golden Age of Piracy in a nutshell. To acknowledge good things about Bellamy and Blackbeard isn’t to praise pirates — it’s to condemn the world that fashioned them.

Top image: So the Treasure Was Divided by the inimitable Howard Pyle, 1905.

I will not be talking like a pirate on International Talk Like a Pirate Day — yet I have a suggestion for Talk Like a Pirate Evening. Tonight, why not curl up in your treasure den with a cup of rum, your favorite gentleman/gentlewoman volunteer (topless, natch), and a copy of Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer?

I can’t resist the marketing opportunity but I do disagree with the association often made between pirates and privateers. Pirates were bound solely by the covenants they made with each other. American privateers like Smedley were regulated not only by the ship’s articles between the men but also by the rules of Congress. Privateers had to post bond to obtain their commission, and violating the rules of conduct — torture, stripping prisoners of their personal belongings, ransacking the cargo — meant loss of the bond and vulnerability to lawsuits from the aggrieved. While not directly analogous, Revolutionary privateers had more in common with the Minutemen or a posse comitatus than with Blackbeard.

The above painting is A Portrait of Things to Come by Marc Davis, a Disney imagineer. It hangs inside the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland and depicts Scarlett, the redhead on the auction block whom guests meet later in the ride, subsequent to her going on the account. It’s a pirate’s life for her.

Analysis of ceramic remains from Barcadares, an 18th-century pirate camp in Belize, showed that more than 65 percent of it was delftware. Numerous pipes and few cups were found, suggesting popular images of buccaneers eating from decorated plates stolen off merchantmen, with a tobacco pipe in one hand and an open bottle in the other, aren’t that far from the truth.

North Carolina has officially confirmed the shipwreck near Beaufort is indeed Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge — in part because the local maritime museum hopes to attract private funding to continue excavation and research.

A total of 122 objects were recovered from the wreck site during the field season. Sixty-five concretions of varying sizes have the potential for containing hundreds of individual artifacts. These concretions will be X-rayed at the conservation lab to help identify what may be contained within. Some artifacts readily apparent on gross external examination include: cannon balls, cask hoops, a pewter plate, and the largest object recovered this season — multiple segments of a deadeye strop with the wood deadeye intact, likely from the port side main mast chain plate.

Over at Black Gate, I’ve scrawled a couple of reviews of the most recent Fighting Fantasy reprints coming out of England.

For the uninitiated: Fighting Fantasy was a 1980s series of choose-your-own-adventure novels with a simple dice mechanic to simulate combat and other physical challenges. Most were written and illustrated by British authors and artists, with all of the off-kilter and macabre sensibility expected from the sons of Albion. I loved Fighting Fantasy as a kid and nowadays read them to my boys, allowing them to make the decisions as they explore ruins, loot tombs, and slay man and monster alike.

In 2009, publisher Wizard Books began reprinting Fighting Fantasy. Several of the best from my childhood, like City of Thieves and Deathtrap Dungeon, are included in this latest series. Other memorable entries, like Scorpion Swamp — the first FF with a non-linear narrative, allowing you to solve it any which way — haven’t appeared yet. But if I had to pick a favorite, all-time best Fighting Fantasy, it would be the one I know will never be reprinted: Seas of Blood.

Seas of Blood revels in villainy and sheer callousness. The scenario is established in less than two pages: you, a pirate captain, wager with another cutthroat named Abdul the Butcher to see who can accumulate the most swag in fifty days. The winner will be declared king of pirates. And just like that, you’re off, tearing through an imaginary Mediterranean Sea on a binge of rapine and terror.

Did I mention this is a book aimed at children?

Clearly inspired by the Harryhausen/Schneer films of the ’60s and ’70s, Seas of Blood is a mish-mash of Greek triremes and Arabic dhows, of cyclops-haunted isles and giant rocs swooping from the skies, of The Odyssey and A Thousand and One Nights — minus any sense of morality. Like all Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, you have personal statistics, but here you also have group scores to indicate the strength of your crew and soundness of your vessel. Booty is acquired through ship-to-ship combat, yes, but you can also venture ashore alone to explore abandoned temples or with your men to ransack towns or fortresses. A particular sequence has your band of scalawags climb a mountain to attack a Tibetan-like monastery and seize their golden idols.

But wealth in Seas of Blood is not measured in lucre alone. Remember those peaceful monks you despoiled a few pages back? You didn’t actually think you’d just leave them to rebuild their lives, did you? Survivors are thrown into the ship’s hold, to be sold at auction the next time you reach port. But even then it’s not so simple. You soon learn the slave markets in various cities pay different amounts, making prices dependent on the available supply. One city, for example, has been victorious in a war with its neighbor, flooding the market with prisoners and depressing prices. Thus you have to carefully choose where to sell so that you receive the highest bids for your human chattel. Hooray market economics!

Having retained my 1985 edition, I recently played it again with my sons, chortling to myself the whole time. We ended just shy of the amount needed to beat Abdul the Butcher and win the title. A shame. All those people murdered and sold into bondage for mere sport.

Reporters were given a gander at some of the artifacts raised from Blackbeard’s ship:

David Moore, nautical archaeologist with the N.C. Maritime Museum, said all of the artifacts date to the early 18th century, the correct time for the shipwreck, which was in November 1718. Two artifacts have dates inscribed, a bell from 1705 and a cannon from 1713. There are four anchors of the correct vintage at the site, and about a quarter million lead shot have been recovered. He said other ships would not necessarily be so heavily armed, and that this is likely leftover armament from a pirate ship.

The article goes on to speculate that Queen Anne’s Revenge could be to North Carolina tourism what the HL Hunley is to South Carolina tourism. But judging from this year’s field report, that may be some time coming since funding for major recovery is not apparent:

Nearly two feet of sand has been deposited in most places since the lowest point recorded in 2005 and is at levels not seen since the shipwreck’s discovery in 1996. With no funding to continue full recovery operations, this is a good development. When sand covers artifacts it is generally conducive to artifact preservation because it puts them in an anaerobic environment and buffers impacts from currents and critters.